In this, the fourth article in the economists’ hubris paper series we look at the contributions of academic thought to the field of asset management. We find that while the theoretical aspects of the modern portfolio theory are valuable they offer little insight into how the asset management industry actually operates, how its executives are compensated, and how their performances are measured.

We consider the combined impact of agency problems and behavioural factors on venture capital/entrepreneur contracting and performance. Particularly, we develop a behavioural game-theoretic model in which a venture capitalist and an entrepreneur negotiate over their respective equity shares, and then exert value-adding efforts in running the business

The biotech cluster in San Diego is dominated by small firms, with approximately 73% of the firms employing between 1 to 49 employees. Among the main important sources of financing for the biotech companies are venture capital and initial public offerings

Competitive advantage is a seemingly ubiquitous concept in business research. Its association with extraordinary firm performance results in interest from managerial audiences, as well as from economists, who hope to explain extraordinary value creation and appropriation

In this, the third paper in the Economists’ Hubris series; we highlight the shortcomings of academic thought in developing models that can be used by financial institutions to institute effective enterprise-wide risk management systems and policies. We find that pretty much all of the models fail when put under intense scientific examinations and that we still have a long way to go before we can develop models that can indeed be effective

This paper considers the case of two fictional brands (‘Duff Beer’ and ‘Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans’) and one computer-synthesized brand (‘Aimee Weber’) and the attachment of these brands to physical products in the real and virtual worlds. The authors contend these cases are not merely manifestations of the \"reverse product placement\" process but are representative of a wider phenomenon, labelled “brand precession”

After the recent scandals and the introduction of new corporate governance codes, non-executive directors (NED\'s) and supervisors have started playing an increasingly important role in providing the ‘checks and balances’ of organizations. Little is known about the way in which NED\'s fulfill their supervisory role

This paper extends the work of Taffler and Tuckett (2005) on Emotional Finance by proposing a new development, namely Emotional Corporate Finance. We argue that managers view their projects as phantastic objects and develop a formal approach that considers the effects of managerial phantasy on the investment appraisal decision, project performance and managerial entrapment in a losing project

This article analyses the methods of attracting customers to retail websites and then satisfying their needs. Porter’s value chain is adapted to the online retail environment to create a model termed “the click chain”, which analyses how users, termed “clicks”, come to a website identifying a variety of sources

It is often claimed that work opportunities decline with age,‭ ‬that hiring chances of older persons are poor. We investigate this by collecting questionnaire responses from personnel managers of German manufacturing firms, eliciting a hypothetical hiring decision based on three fictitious candidates

This study addresses the research question why some companies do and others do not have women on their boards. This study provides evidence on the organizational characteristics that affect the likelihood of women being appointed